A marble stone is a high-grade building material with its unique texture, nobleness and elegance. The marble stone is also widely used in production or various artworks.
The marbles may be divided into a natural marble and an artificial marble, both having calcium carbonate as the main component, which is susceptible to corrosion by acidic materials, is soft in texture and highly susceptible to fragmentation under excessive pressure. Therefore, the marble stone, especially one with a special-shaped face, is hard to polish for desirable effects.
In the existing mechanical polishing process of building materials and artworks of marble stone whether utilizing a handheld polisher, a small round grinder, a hand grinder, an automatic grinding machine or a line grinding machine and the like, these machines and tools exert pressure and rotate at a high speed on the surface of the marble stone, and water is added to lower the temperature, then the surface of the marble stone is polished by the frictional force between an abrasive material and the marble stone. During polishing, coarse-to-fine and gradually smooth grinding marks on the surface of the marble stone are realized by gradually reducing granularity of the abrasive material so as to meet specific requirements.
There exist two main polishing principles, a particle grinding principle and a physical chemistry principle. According to the first principle, when polishing, the abrasive material grinds on the surface of the marble stone, and grinding marks become finer and finer until indistinguishable by naked eyes, that is, a mirror effect appears. According to the second principle, the polishing process is adjusted for humidity and temperature and enhanced so as to permit physical and chemical reactions to take place on the surface of the marble stone, thereby allowing a gradual increase in surface gloss of the marble stone.
A traditional rotation grinding and polishing method can be effectively applied to the polishing of plane marble stone, but is ineffective in handling special-shaped marble stones such as marble stones with solid geometric faces like convex-concave surfaces, small arc surfaces, reliefs, etc.
The existing polishing of special-shaped marble stones such as mosaic, background wall marble stones having various geometric special-shaped faces, inserts marble stones with relief patterns, relief stone line marble stones, marble stones with carve patterns and marble stones with concave-convex line drawing patterns can only be done manually by using waterproof abrasive papers repeatedly, so that the production efficiency is low, the processing cost is high, and the product quality is heavily dependent on the experience of an operator and cannot be guaranteed. Furthermore, during manual grinding, dust is be produced, the grinding is labor intensive, and long repeated polishing actions seriously jeopardize the health of a hand polishing worker.
Moreover, only marble stones with single mirror surface flatting effect can be machined by traditional rotation grinding and polishing method. The polished surfaces of marble building materials and artworks appear extremely inferior to rich representations of polished surfaces of building materials of metal, glass, ceramic and other materials.
In order to render better finish to the marble, it is a common practice to add polishing powder or polishing solution later in the mechanical rotation grinding and polishing, while in the renovation of marble stones, for example marble walls and grounds, marble crystal face polishing agent is mainly used. The polishing efficiency and polishing effect may be improved by using the polishing agent. Recognized principles thereof are that physical and chemical reactions are allowed to take place between nanometer particles in the polishing solution and the surface of the marble stone so as to fill micropores in the surface of the marble, thereby making the surface of the marble smooth and clean. While in the rotation grinding and polishing of the marble stone, the grinding force is relatively high, resulting in a large waste of polishing agent added. Only a small part of the polishing agent acts, thus a large amount of polishing agent is needed.
Vibration polishing is now mainly applied to products with high hardness, for example moulds and jewelry jades and the like, and has an excellent polishing effect. But, for soft materials with loose texture such as marbles, after vibration polishing, stone powder may constantly fall off from the surface of the marble. Not only is the surface not glossy, but also the surface will be deformed by grinding or will be full of small pits and concave texture, causing a feeling of staleness and mattness.